“Well,” cried Annie. “Shall us throw the pretty lady’s ring into the deep sea? It’ll mean trouble for her, trouble and tears, Luke! Be ’ee of a mind to do it, or be ’ee not? ’Tis your hand must fling it, and with the flinging of it, her heart ’ll drop, splash — splash — into deep sorrow. She’ll cry her eyes out, for this ’ere job, and that’s the truth of it, Luke darling. Be ’ee ready to fling it, or be ’ee not ready? There’ll be no getting it back, once us have thro wed it in.”
She held out her arm towards him as she spoke, and with her other hand pushed back her hair from her forehead. For so soft and tender a creature as the girl was, it was strange, the wild Maenad-like look, which she wore at that moment. She might have been an incarnation of the avenging deities of sea and air, threatening disaster to some unwitting Olympian.
Luke scrambled to his feet, and seizing her wrist with both his hands, forced her fingers apart, and possessed himself of the equivocal trinket.
“If I throw it,” he cried, in an excited tone, “will you be my wife, Annie?”
At this unexpected word a complete collapse overtook the girl. All trace of colour left her cheeks and a sudden trembling passed through her limbs. She staggered, and would have fallen, if Luke had not seized her in his arms.
In the shock of saving her, the stone-carver’s hand involuntarily unclosed, and the piece of gold, slipping from his fingers, fell down upon the slope of the rock, and sliding over its edge, sank into the deep water.
“Annie! Annie! What is it, dear?” murmured Luke, making the trembling girl sit down by his side, and supporting her tenderly.
For her only answer she flung her arms round his neck and kissed him passionately again and again. It was not only of kisses that Luke became conscious, for, as she pressed him to her, her breast heaved pitifully under her print frock, and when she let him go, the taste of her tears was in his mouth. For the first time in his life the queer wish entered the stonecarver’s mind that he had not, in his day, made love quite so often.
There was something so pure, so confiding, and yet so passionately tender, about little Annie’s abandonment, that it produced, in the epicurean youth’s soul, a most quaint sense of shame and embarrassment. It was deliciously sweet to him, all the same, to find how, beyond expectation, he had made so shrewd a choice. But he wished some humorous demon at the back of his mind wouldn’t call up before him at that moment the memory of other clinging arms and lips.
With an inward grin of sardonic commentary upon his melting mood, the cynical thought passed through his mind, how strange it was, in this mortal world, that human kisses should all so lamentably resemble one another, and that human tears should all leave behind them the same salt taste! Life was indeed a matter of “eternal recurrence,” and whether with Portland and its war-ships as the background, or with Nevilton Mount and its shady woods, the same emotions and the same reactions must needs come and go, with the same inexorable monotony!
He glanced down furtively into the foam-flecked water, but there was no sign of the lost ring. The tide seemed to have turned now, and the sea appeared less calm. Little flukes of white spray surged up intermittently on the in-rolling waves, and a strong breath of wind, rising with the sinking of the sun, blew cool and fresh upon their foreheads.
“Her ring’s gone,” whispered Annie, pulling down her sleeves over her soft arms, and holding out her wrists, for him to fasten the bands, “and you do belong to none but I now, Luke. When shall us be married, dear?” she added, pressing her cool cheek against his, and running her fingers through his hair.
The words, as well as the gesture that accompanied them, jarred upon Luke’s susceptibilities.
“Why is it,” he thought, “that girls are so extraordinarily stupid in these things? Why do they always seem only waiting for an opportunity to drop their piquancy and provocation, and become confident, assured, possessive, complacent? Have I,” he said to himself, “made a horrible blunder? Shall I regret this day forever, and be ready to give anything for those fatal words not to have been uttered?”
He glanced down once more upon the brimming, in-rushing tide that covered Gladys’ ring. Then with a jerk he pulled out his watch.
“Go and call the others,” he commanded, “I’m going to have a dip before we start.”
Annie glanced quickly into his face, but reassured by his friendly smile, proceeded to obey him, with only the least little sigh.
“Don’t drown yourself, dear,” she called back to him, as she made her way cautiously across the rocks.
Luke hurriedly undressed, and standing for a moment, a slim golden figure, in the horizontal sunlight, swung himself lightly down over the rock’s edge and struck out boldly for the open sea.
With vigorous strokes he wrestled with the inflowing tide. Wave after wave splashed against his face. Pieces of floating sea-weed and wisps of surf clung to his arms and hair. But he held resolutely on, breathing deep breaths of liberty and exultation, and drinking in, as if from a vast wide-brimmed cup, the thrilling spaciousness of air and sky.
Girls, love-making, marriage, — the whole complication of the cloying erotic world, — fell away from him, like the too-soft petals of some great stifling velvet-bosomed flower; and naked of desire, as he was naked of human clothes, he gave himself up to the free, pure elements. In later hours, when once more the old reiterated tune was beating time in his brain, he recalled with regret the large emancipation of that moment.
As he splashed and spluttered, and turned over deliciously in the water, like some exultant human-limbed merman, returning, after a long inland exile, to his natural home, he found his thoughts fantastically reverting to those queer, mad ideas, about the evil power of the stone they both worked upon, to which James Andersen had given expression when his wits were astray. Here at any rate, in the solid earth’s eternal antagonist, was a power capable of destroying every sinister spell.
He remorsefully blamed himself that he had not compelled his brother to come down with them to the sea. He recalled the half-hearted invitation he had extended to James, not altogether sorry to have it refused, and not repeating it. He had been a selfish fool, he thought. Were James swimming now by his side, his pleasure in that violet-coloured coast-line and that titanic rock-monster, would have been doubled by the revival of indescribably appealing memories.
He made a vigorous resolution that never again — whatever mood his brother might be in — would he allow the perilous lure of exquisite femininity, to come between him and the nobler classic bond, of the love that “passeth the love of women.”
Conscious that he must return without a moment’s further delay if they were to catch their train, he swung round in the water and let the full tide bear him shoreward.
On the way back he was momentarily assailed by a slight touch of cramp in his legs. It quickly passed, but it was enough to give the life-enamoured youth a shock of cold panic. Death? That, after all, he thought, was the only intolerable thing. As long as one breathed and moved, in this mad world, nothing that could happen greatly mattered! One was conscious, — one could note the acts and scenes of the incredible drama; and in this mere fact of consciousness, one could endure anything. But to be dead, — to be deprived of the sweet air, — that remained, that must always remain, the one absolute Terror!
Reaching his starting-place, Luke was amused to observe that the tide was already splashing over their rock, and in another minute or two would have drenched his clothes. He chuckled to himself as he noted how this very practical possibility jerked his mind into a completely different vein. Love, philosophy, friendship, all tend to recede to the very depths of one’s invaluable consciousness, when there appears a risk of returning to a railway station in a drenched shirt.